Praha Hooliganism

During high school and college I grew into a bit of a soccer fan. I played the game growing up but gave it up before high school. At MMU and Swarthmore I loved going to games and cheering and jeering (always very respectfully). In Prague, I may have met my match.

I went to a game with Jordan, Pete, Jake and some other guys from their program.  I've been to rowdy pro matches before, most notably a match in Argentinawhere things were so heated that they locked the home fans in the stadium for a half hour so the visiting team could get out of the city safely. I still think the Prague game was rowdier because it was between the two top teams in the city, AC Sparta and SK Slavia Praha, and the crowd was pretty evenly split between the two sides.

As we circled the stadium looking for the ticket office, we noticed that we were most certainly in the outskirts of town and this was not the Swarmore-Haverford game. From the metro station we could hear the chants and although my check is awful I'm fairly certain that they weren't saying "safety school." There was a fairly impressive police presence, half in SWAT gear (again, not the SWAT gear that shows up to Swarthmore games) and half on horseback. In the process of finding the ticket office, we saw five fans forceably removed, each still screaming his allegiance while being carried out by ten officers.

Once we got inside the stadium and saw what the non-delinquent fans were doing, I got to wondering what the other fans could have done to get thrown out. We were a little late and were surprised to even get into the game, so we took whatever tickets they gave us, which ended up in Slavia Praha's section, which was the away team since the game was in Sparta's stadium. When we got to our section, we couldn't even get to our seats because everyone was standing and it seemed like fans from other sections came to our section because it was the rowdiest Slavia section. We went to the section directly below and were surprised to find the first ten rows from the field completely empty. We took a row and quickly realized that there was a stream of spit, beer, trash and potentially piss coming down from the second deck.

For the second half, we relocated to a sheltered section and were able to focus more on the game. We couldn't figure out who to root for or how openly to cheer. We were in a Slavia section, but were right next to the Sparta section. The language barrier also complicated things. Jordan, self-described as a "Swattie for life", was proudly wearing a Garnet Swarthmore hat until he was yelled at by a Slavia fan and we realized that Sparta had practically stolen our logo. Pschh...safety school...

All said, it was one of the few soccer games where I didn't constructively criticize refs or make comments relating to any player's family members. I am looking forward to going to a soccer football game where I can safely join in on the hooliganism.